Hey friend,

I hope you've been well!  

This week I was watching a bunch of videos on melody writing, and I came across something really interesting that has to do with how our brain evolved to pick up on melodies.

Most languages use some form of melody during speech. Some languages like mandarin are very tonal languages, and the way you pronounce a word can change the meaning of the word. One word could be 5 different words depending how you pronounce it.

In English, we use melody in our sentences to emphasize certain words, or raise in pitch at the end of a sentence when we ask a question. If you were to speak in one note monotone you would sound like a robot, and it would be pretty jarring. People who are great public speakers really emphasize the melody of their speech as well as using their hands to be more expressive.

The interesting thing I found is that because we have evolved this way of speaking, and our brains developed the ability to recognize melody in our speech patterns and encoded that into our languages, we have also developed the ability to recognize melody and pitch in music and this is the reason that melodies get stuck in our head. Fascinating! Remember that the next time you have an annoying song stuck in your head!

So how do we actually write a catchy melody? There are a few things we can do to make our melodies more memorable.

Easy to Sing

First, make it simple and easy to sing or hum. Melodies that jump around too much are hard to sing and therefore hard to get stuck in our heads. The most catchy melodies are usually within one octave, or even less. Some of the catchiest melodies of all time are within a fifth of the root note, meaning using only 5 notes of the scale.

Here you can see Illenium’s Afterlife uses only 5 notes of the scale making this melody very easy to sing and remember. (Click the pictures to go to Hook Theory and listen for yourself)

Repetition

Second, having certain parts of the melody repeat will help stick it in peoples heads. The goal is having enough repetition so that the melody sticks, but also not too much that we get sick of it. A common way of doing this is with the Rule of Three - repeat something 3 times, and on the 4th time change it.

A good example of this is Porter Robinson’s Sad Machine

Here you can see Porter repeats the exact same motif 3 times and on the 4th he changes it just enough that we feel satisfied.

Call and Response

The last thing I want to mention is one of the most important ones, and that is the idea of a call and response, or a question and answer. This technique will set your music apart from the amateur because almost all of the best melodies use this form.

In Tame Impala’s The Less I Know The Better he uses this technique and it can’t help but getting stuck in our heads immediately.

The first two bars are the question, and the 3rd and 4th bars are the answer, which then repeats. This is an easy way to keep your melodies interesting and it’s one that you can use all throughout your music.

Further Research

If you want to go further on your own and study some melodies from popular songs, you can check out Theory Tab on Hook Theory

Book Recommendation

Why I love this book

When I was learning music theory and harmony, this book was the most useful thing I could have ever hoped for. It is filled with harmony principles that I still use in my music every day, and it has TONS of exercises for you to try out in your DAW or on a piano so you can follow along as you read.

If you are a music producer who can’t read music notation, and are use to using MIDI piano rolls for writing your music, then this book will be perfect for you! This book is perfect for those who already have a basic understanding of music theory, keys, scales, and chords, but don’t really know how to put all of that into practice to write beautiful music.

Key Takeaways

• Learn how to write a four part harmony around a melody or a bass line

• Create harmonically complex music

• Learn about tonic and dominant harmony

• How to use chord extensions like 7ths, 9ths, 11ths and 13ths

• Learn how to modulate to a new key

• Learn about modal interchange

If you want to level up your music theory and harmony knowledge then I highly recommend picking this one up!

Harmony for Computer Musicians - Michael Hewitt

 Take care my friend,

- Niko